THE VALUE OF SOCIAL NETWORK AS FUNCTION OF NUMBER OF USERS

Year 2012, Volume: 4 Issue: 1, 181 - 189, 01.06.2012

Petras Lickus

Abstract

At the presence of network externality, the value of a product or service is dependent on the number of others using it. This means that the more social network has subscribers, the greater its value. Metcalfe’s law states that network value is proportional to the number of users in square. Reed's law takes into account the possibility of groups’ formation. In this case, network value scales exponentially with the size of the network. Odlyzko is much more moderate. He argues that the incremental value of adding one person to network of n people is approximately the n-th harmonic number. From early ages of television Sarnoff stated that the value of a broadcast network is proportional to the number of viewers. This paper deals with the problem of determining the value of such social networks as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. as function of the number of users and other parameters

Keywords

social networks, Metcalfe‘s law, network externality

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